WHY ARE THERE SIMPLE RULES IN A COMPLICATED UNIVERSE

The role of science is to seek simplicity in a complex world. Nature exhibits many remarkable regularities and patterns, and science works by assuming that these patterns arise from the regularities and patterns of the underlying 'laws of nature' that govern them. This is a comfortable picture, which encourages a view of the relation between laws and their consequences-between cause and effect, ie simple rules imply simple behaviour, therefore complicated behaviour must arise from complicated rules. This article questions whether chaos and complexity theories hold the answer to the mysteries of emergent phenomena such as mind, consciousness, biological form and social structure